


Answers to Questions Asked by Forever

by QuoteMyFoot



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Angst, Booker is mentioned but he's not present, Discussion of Abortion, Discussion of Pregnancy, Gen, Nile Freeman Needs a Hug, Post-Canon, Team Bonding, Team Feels, Team as Family, mentioned child death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-08
Updated: 2021-03-08
Packaged: 2021-03-15 05:13:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,612
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29928420
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/QuoteMyFoot/pseuds/QuoteMyFoot
Summary: The team are there to give Nile reassurance and advice when she has a frightening realisation—no matter what happens, they have her back until the end.AKA: the talk, but for immortals.
Relationships: Andy | Andromache of Scythia & Nile Freeman, Nile Freeman & Nicky | Nicolo di Genoa
Comments: 8
Kudos: 52





	Answers to Questions Asked by Forever

It’s been a few months since… everything. They’re used to being a four and a missing limb, and while Nicky wouldn't give Nile up for the world, he can see that the obvious difference is wearing on everyone. The absence of Booker’s warm cynicism has unbalanced them, Andy still making the jokes for Joe to respond to without Booker’s grumbling to wind them down. Instead, there’s Nile, eyes darting between everyone warily, having no reference for how their strange little family functions—knowing only the wounds made by the betrayal and not the before.

Nile can see it too, ways she doesn’t fit in—in-jokes and old stories that were worn out centuries ago. But if she let that stop her, she wouldn’t be Nile. The first time she challenged them to a game of Never Have I Ever, triumphantly held her glass aloft and said, “Never have I ever died of dysentery,” to groans from the rest of them, Nicky knew: she belonged with them, until the end.

She’s the one pushing them into a new equilibrium, making them try new things and simply _relax_ together in a way they haven’t for a few decades—not properly, anyway, for the sake of enjoying things, instead of avoiding things.

Of course, despite dying a few times, she’s still in her twenties, so she makes them all go clubbing.

Nicky had tried raves when they first came in vogue, and hadn’t been impressed then—loud and sweaty and packed with strangers, many of whom were freer with their hands than they should be. But Andy, he knew, secretly loved the feel of the music pounding through her head, and Joe loved to dance, and Nile deserved these small chances to feel normal, even with an uncertain eternity stretching out in front of her, so he didn’t object.

In the club, Nicky puts himself on unofficial guard duty, hanging by the bar and watching Nile whilst Andy and Joe enjoy themselves. Their healing interacts strangely with alcohol, technically a poison—they _can_ get drunk, as Booker has proved over and over, but the buzz will suddenly cut out at odd points as the body heals from the effects.

He watches Nile come back up to the bar throughout the night in various states of sobriety, sometimes with laughter and sloppy kisses to his cheek, other times making urgent and earnest inquiries as to if he’s having fun.

About halfway through the evening, she acquires a man to follow her to the bar, hands around her waist or arms or neck. Nicky spies her hand tucked into one of the back pockets of his jeans and smiles to himself. Why shouldn’t she have some fun? They’ve all done it at one point or another, although he and Joe like to find someone together, and they have separate hotel rooms. If Nile wants to share hers with someone tonight, well, he hopes she enjoys herself.

The fun turns sour later in the evening. Nicky’s gaze turns sharp when he sees Nile arguing with her man. He throws his arms about in broad, expansive gestures, whilst Nile looks like she’s sober again. Nicky threads his way through the crowd until he stands at her shoulder, glaring down at the man.

He raises his hands, “Hey, hey, I didn’t do nothing! I just asked if she wanted to go to my place or hers and she suddenly goes all cold—”

Nile shrinks back against Nicky’s chest. “Look, I just—changed my mind. Sorry.”

“You’ve been hanging off me all evening!” The man shake his head in frustration. “What gives? Come on…”

Nile shouldn’t shrink from anything. Something is wrong. “Piss off,” Nicky tells the man, putting an arm around her shoulders and pulling her away. Her breath hitches and he looks over his shoulder to glower at the stranger, but the man is already shoving his way to the bar, ignoring them.

“It’s—he really didn’t do anything,” Nile says, reflexively playing with one of her braids. “I was fine with it—I just—suddenly—” She wraps her arms around herself. “Can we go back to the hotel?”

Nicky doesn’t press then. He grabs them a cab after giving Joe a signal to say ‘stay here, nothing serious’ and they’re driven back to the hotel in silence. Nile stares out the window, her hands folded over her stomach.

Outside her hotel room, though, Nicky pauses and asks, “Do you want me to stay up with you for a bit?”

Nile smiles; it’s weak and thin, but it’s there. “Please.”

She makes them some of the hotel’s fruit tea, caffeine free, and Nicky waits patiently for her to say something as it brews.

“I just thought—” She stops herself. Nicky watches her almost shrink within her sparkly dress, until she’s looking up at him through her lashes. “I mean… with you and Joe… I suppose you’ve never had to worry about kids, have you?”

His stomach sinks like a stone and he feels like an utter idiot. _Of course. She just lost her family…_ “I—we’ve taken care of a few strays, over the years.” He pauses, because he knows it isn’t quite the same. “But we were always… prepared to let them go. Prepared for them to find someone else to take care of them.”

“Of course you would do that,” she says softly.

There’s another long pause. Nicky picks up his mug for the sake of having something to do.

Nile cuts straight to what, he knows, must be the heart of the matter. “I can still get pregnant, can’t I?”

“Yes.”

“Booker said…” She stumbles over the words. Everything with Booker is still too raw for them; he’s rarely mentioned. But Nicky knows this is important so he puts a hand on her knee, encouraging. “He said he’d lost his sons.”

“Yes,” Nicky says again. He suspects she isn’t looking for answers or comfort right now, only for affirmation.

“It’s not genetic.” Nile stirs a sachet of sugar into her tea. “So if I got pregnant… if I had a child… I’d outlive them, wouldn’t I? He told me he had condoms back at his place and I just thought—nothing is foolproof—what if I…”

She lapses into silence.

Nicky says, “Joe was married when we met.”

Nile looks up, sharp.

“His wife thought she might be pregnant, before… the fighting happened. He never went back to find out for sure.”

Joe had only told him a decade afterwards. He’d said he knew his brothers would take care of her, and the child, if there was one, if they lived, _if…_

They knew so little back then of what they were—they wouldn’t meet Andy and Quynh for nearly another century—and Nicky, still half feeling like an enemy and an unmarried man, had been in no position to judge, only honoured to hear this small piece of an important truth from someone he knew his existence was now entwined with. Joe said then he thought their deaths and new lives were a sign that he should part with his family, and Nicky believed him. Nicky still believes he meant it, all these centuries later, but he also sees Joe sometimes sitting and staring into nothing, and knows he is wondering about that maybe-life, and how it might have been lived.

Nile digests Nicky’s words silently, and then asks, “Andy?”

He knew she would ask, but he still winces. “Yes,” he says.

Nile winces as well. “But then—Booker—why didn’t she… couldn’t you…?”

“Of course she talked to him. And Joe.” Nicky shakes his head. He’d tried in his own way to offer comfort and advice, of course, but Booker hadn’t taken anything he’d said seriously—perhaps rightfully so. He’s seen enough of the pain of a parent burying their own children secondhand to be thankful that it’s an experience he has never had. “But it’s… it’s not something you can teach anyone. How to live with the pain. Everyone has a different answer.”

Nicky hasn’t left behind any children, but he did have a family, once. Three sisters, all older than him. They used to play together in the Italian sunshine. He knows that, but the memories have faded in to vague feelings of warmth and happiness. About a century ago, he forgot his youngest sister’s name, and it took twenty years for something to remind him and for it to come back. He knows that one day he might not remember again at all.

“Sorry,” Nile says. “I shouldn’t… it wasn’t your fault. Of course you tried.” She shuffles awkwardly in the hotel chair. “Do you think Andy would mind if I talked to her later?”

She looks so small and lost that Nicky can’t help sweeping her into his arms. “Of course not,” he whispers. Cheek to cheek, Nile returns the embrace with a tight squeeze. “Whatever you need, we’re here for you. From now until the end.”

*

With Nicky’s murmured explanation in her ear the next morning, Andy prepares herself for a difficult conversation. She almost expects Nile to ask her then and there, over mediocre hotel breakfast, but she doesn’t. Nile spends the next few days in contemplative silence as they travel into mainland Europe, south to warmer climates for the tourist season, where they’ll just be a few more faces in the crowd.

They rent an apartment together rather than a hotel, at Nile’s request—and perhaps that was what she was waiting for, something close to a feeling of home, because one evening when Joe and Nicky are wrapped up in each other and Andy and Nile are sharing a bottle of wine out on the balcony, Nile suddenly asks, “How many times have you been pregnant?”

Andy expected this question, but she wasn’t expecting it to be the opening salvo. She freezes with the wine glass halfway to her lips, and gives herself a few seconds of breathing space by setting it down on the small table very, very carefully. Her hand shakes.

“I lost count,” she says.

Nile winces, but she deserves honesty in this. Even as the oldest of them, Andy has no clear answers for her. Nile might only have a few hundred years, like Lykon, or she might live for even longer than Andy herself. There’s no way of knowing.

She has to prepare herself.

“How can you… how can you…”

“How could I forget?” Andy finishes for her, and Nile nods. “I tried to hold onto the names of my sisters, my mother, for a long, long time.”

Even now, she sometimes gets a feeling of deja vu when hearing certain names—not _their_ names, of course, the language they were named in died out before writing was invented—but something _close,_ she thinks. Did her mother’s name start with this same sound? Did one of her sister’s names rhyme with this word?

Sometimes, the names feel like they’re right on the tip of her tongue, like only a moment more and they’ll come spilling out. They never do.

“My children,” Andy explains, “I tried to forget.” She takes a long, _long_ drink from her glass, draining it and setting it back down on the table with a quiet _clink._ Nile doesn’t interrupt. “Most of my earliest memories are lost to time. I call myself ‘Andromache of Scythia’, but that’s not the name or the place where I was born; it’s just something I can clearly remember. I was worshipped as a god for a time, back then—no, I wasn’t joking,” she adds, when she sees Nile raise her eyebrows. “If I wanted, I could have almost any man or woman I wanted.

“And even back then…” Andy takes a deep breath and closes her eyes, chasing the foggy memory. She remembers the name it gave her more than she remembers this period of history, but this—this lesson is something that’s engrained in her very soul. “I don’t remember my first born. But even back then, I remember being frightened of lying with a man, because I wasn’t sure if I had the strength to face burying another child.”

“But you did?” Nile guesses.

“Eventually,” Andy says. “I’m sure you can guess that pregnancy wasn’t as easy to avoid back then, and what abortifacients there were had nasty side effects—not something I had to worry about, but that and the stigma made them difficult to get hold of. So, yes. Throughout the years, I’ve had many children. I didn’t raise most of them myself. Too dangerous for the child, too painful for me. Eventually, I just learned to live with it. You lose enough people and your own children don’t feel that much worse…”

Not that much worse, but still _worse._ Nile is already pouring her another glass without Andy having to ask. She takes it and forces herself to sip instead of gulp it down. It’s nice wine, not meant for them to really get drunk on. She savours the tastes instead, picking them out carefully. Some of them are new enough that she can remember the first time she tasted them. The world really is different, these days.

“I know they have those… tablets now,” she says. “Much more reliable than anything in the old days. It’s hardly contraband, I’m sure we can get you some. Who knows, it might never be an issue.”

Nile squints at her, then finally cracks and grins. “You have no idea how the pill works, do you?”

“Not in the slightest,” Andy admits.

She smiles herself when Nile throws her head back and laughs, loud and long. It’s good to see her smiling again after the sombre air that’s been draped over her like a shawl. Andy obviously isn’t the only one who thinks so, as the noise brings Nicky and Joe out to the tiny balcony, making it comfortably crowded.

“…no reason why it shouldn’t work, though,” Nile is saying to herself when they arrive. “It’s hormones, not poison. Hormones to mimic pregnancy, so if I can get pregnant just fine, there’s no reason for the medication to get healed off…”

“Ah.” Joe immediately realises what they must’ve been talking about; Andy can see the joke that he swallows before he adds, “So you’ve found a solution that works for you, then?”

“Yeah, I think so,” Nile says.

It might not be enough. It’s a slim chance of failure, but a slim chance played out over the course of several human lifetimes. Still, it’s important not to borrow trouble. Andy has helped Nile all she can, but ultimately, if it does happen, she’ll have to find her own way of coping.

_Maybe Booker will have something useful to say by then._

“Now, come on, you two have been wrapped up in yourself this whole evening,” Nile is saying, forcefully pouring extra glasses for Joe and Nicky—glasses Joe brought with them, so perhaps she doesn’t need to make such a show of making them stay, but it’s an easy way for her to change the subject so they’ll let her have it. “If you’re such good company, why don’t you come and let us enjoy some of it?”

Joe looks down at his now full glass of wine. “That’s a question, but I somehow feel like I’m not being asked.”

“Just say, ‘yes, boss’,” Nicky advises.

Andy snorts when Nile looks vaguely alarmed. “Uh, no way. You’re not putting no responsibility on me.”

She won’t be around to help Nile forever, but as long as she has the others, and herself, Andy knows she’ll be okay. Until the end.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm a bit late to the party, I just watched the film for the first time the other night. But I absolutely fell in love with it! Since this is the first thing I've written for the fandom, I'd especially appreciate feedback on the characterisation, but any kind of comments or criticisms you might have are welcome. All comments are loved :)


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